Magistrates found guilty of breaking a 300-year-old law

LEGISLATION should be introduced to regularise the position of foreign magistrates following the discovery of 300-year-old legislation making it illegal for them to sit on the bench, a legal commentator said yesterday.

LEGISLATION should be introduced to regularise the position of foreign magistrates following the discovery of 300-year-old legislation making it illegal for them to sit on the bench, a legal commentator said yesterday.

Peter Carter-Ruck said the best way to correct the "inadvertent mistake" affecting lay members of the 26,000 magistrates in Wales and England would be for some form of retrospective legislation.

The Lord Chancellor, Lord Irvine, has issued an immediate order to all magistrates who are not Irish or Commonwealth citizens to stop sitting because they are banned under the Act of Settlement 1701.

Mr Carter-Ruck said, "It is unfortunate that this has lasted so long without being discovered.

"There should be retrospective legislation to validate their appointment over the previous period and to permit them to be reappointed from the day of this being discovered.

"This has obviously been done inadvertently and action to rectify it should be taken soon."

Retrospective legislation, while undesirable, can be applied in situations where accidental errors are uncovered. Under the Trustee Act 1925 it has been used to correct an inadvertent breach of trust.

The number of magistrates affected by the ban runs into "at most three figures", according to the Lord Chancellor's department.

Professor Michael Zander, emeritus professor of law at the London School of Economics, said, "This finding is a great surprise and it must have been an even greater surprise to the Lord Chancellor's department. It is one of those oddball things that happen. It is a one-off and the system immediately corrects itself."

The Magistrates' Association, said, "It is unfortunate that this is something that is essentially illegal and that it has only just been found out."

A Lord Chancellor's spokesman said, "We are now looking at how to regularise the position."